Boeing and NASA teams take part in a general rehearsal of the mission to prepare for the landing of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft in White Sands, New Mexico.
Boeing’s Starliner capsule is preparing to return to Earth on Wednesday in the final step of a key test flight to prove that it is worthy of providing trips to NASA astronauts on the International Space Station.
The spacecraft is scheduled to take off autonomously at 14:36 Eastern Time (18:36 GMT) and land in New Mexico just over four hours later, at 22:49 GMT, ending a mission. six days crucial to restoring Boeing’s reputation after past failures.
Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) is the last hurdle Starliner must remove before transporting humans on another test flight that could take place later this year.
Starliner met with the ISS on Friday, a day after leaving the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Over the weekend, astronauts aboard the research platform opened the hatch and “hello” to the capsule’s only passenger: Rosie the Rocketeer, a dummy equipped with sensors to understand what experienced the human crew during the voyage.
The mission has not been without its problems. These include propulsion problems at the start of Starliner’s journey that saw two propellers responsible for placing it in a stable orbit fail, although officials insisted there was a lot of redundancy built into the system.
On the day of the docking, the ship lost its scheduled contact time by more than an hour, after a ring responsible for sticking to the station did not unfold properly. Engineers had to retract the ring and remove it again before it ran a second time.
Still, the bugs are small compared to the problems Starliner saw during its first test release, in 2019, when a software bug caused it to burn too much fuel to reach its destination, and another almost went signify that the vehicle was destroyed during re-entry.
The second error was detected in time to load a patch, and the ship was able to make a smooth landing, slowed by its huge parachutes, at White Sands Space Harbor, the same spaceport where the space shuttles were launched and where it is located. Starliner once again. planned for landing.
Boeing and NASA also attempted to launch Starliner in August 2021, but the capsule was removed from the launch pad to deal with the sticky valves that did not open as they should and eventually the ship was sent from new to the factory to fix it.
NASA wants to certify Starliner as the second “taxi” service for its astronauts on the space station, a role that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has provided since it was successful in a test mission for its Dragon capsule on 2020.
Boeing’s Starliner approaches the ISS on a high-risk test mission
© 2022 AFP
Quote: Boeing Starliner faces another challenge when he returns to Earth (2022, May 25) recovered on May 25, 2022
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